Impressions of Theophrastus Such eBook

it, as something quite grandly pathetic; but finding
the facts turn out meagre, and her audience cold,
she broke off, saying, “It sounded so much finer
in French—­j’ai vu le sang de mon
pere, and so on—­I wish I could repeat
it in French.” This was a pardonable illusion
in an old-fashioned lady who had not received the
polyglot education of the present day; but I observe
that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiring
acceptance solely by virtue of the French language,
and one may fairly desire that what seems a just discrimination
should profit by the fashionable prejudice in favour
of La Bruyere’s idiom. But I wish he had
added that the habit of dragging the ludicrous into
topics where the chief interest is of a different
or even opposite kind is a sign not of endowment,
but of deficiency. The art of spoiling is within
reach of the dullest faculty: the coarsest clown
with a hammer in his hand might chip the nose off
every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand grinning
at the effect of his work. Because wit is an exquisite
product of high powers, we are not therefore forced
to admit the sadly confused inference of the monotonous
jester that he is establishing his superiority over
every less facetious person, and over every topic on
which he is ignorant or insensible, by being uneasy
until he has distorted it in the small cracked mirror
which he carries about with him as a joking apparatus.
Some high authority is needed to give many worthy
and timid persons the freedom of muscular repose under
the growing demand on them to laugh when they have
no other reason than the peril of being taken for
dullards; still more to inspire them with the courage
to say that they object to the theatrical spoiling
for themselves and their children of all affecting
themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men, by
burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich
fishmongers in the stalls and their assistants in
the gallery. The English people in the present
generation are falsely reputed to know Shakspere (as,
by some innocent persons, the Florentine mule-drivers
are believed to have known the Divina Commedia,
not, perhaps, excluding all the subtle discourses
in the Purgatorio and Paradiso); but
there seems a clear prospect that in the coming generation
he will be known to them through burlesques, and that
his plays will find a new life as pantomimes.
A bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous
corpulence from which he will frantically dance himself
free during the midnight storm; Rosalind and Celia
will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and
shepherdesses; Ophelia in fleshings and a voluminous
brevity of grenadine will dance through the mad scene,
finishing with the famous “attitude of the scissors”
in the arms of Laertes; and all the speeches in “Hamlet”
will be so ingeniously parodied that the originals
will be reduced to a mere memoria technica
of the improver’s puns—­premonitory
signs of a hideous millennium, in which the lion will
have to lie down with the lascivious monkeys whom
(if we may trust Pliny) his soul naturally abhors.